This was the shallow dig to Hunter, who sounded like he was in the kettle under the tree (a big space) but he was actually in a small tight pipe under my left leg. The box said he was there, but it was Misto who confirmed it. Hunter had shoved dirt behind himself while digging on, and I think he had boxed himself in.

I took this picture of a Bald Eagle nest about a half mile from my house yesterday.

As you can see from the pictures, below, the nest is actually between a split highway (George Washington Parkway) next to the Potomac River, and directly across from Georgetown University. I used to row crew and fish this stretch of the river when I was in high school, and now I live a short walk to it. The shad will be running thick up the river just these fish eagle chicks begin to pip out of the shell.

We now have about 1,200 nesting bald eagles in Virginia, a sum that is not likely to have been seen since early colonial days.

Friday, March 16, 2018

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Bert Gripton is one of the few legendary terriermen who was not principally known for breeding dogs, but for working them. He had a small pack of working terriers and whippets, and was terrierman to the Albrighton Foxhounds. His father was a gamekeeper on the Aqualate estate in Staffordshire near the Shropshire border.

Gripton was a die-hard digger who specialized in badger, but he also hunted otter (he took the last legal otter in the UK), and fox. Phil Drabble, author Of Pedigree Unknown, said that Gripton "could, and did, catch Fox with greater certainty than the hounds."

Bert Gripton kept a pack of small dogs. This is not surprising -- the more people dig, the more they seem to value a small dog able to get up to the quarry and to maneuver around and with it. Brian Nuttal notes of Gripton's terriers: "No one called them Jack Russells in those days, just white hunt terriers."

Phil Drabble explained Gripton's technique for removing a fox:

"Quite often it was the fox's grinning mask which came into view, in which case there is an effective trick that requires supreme confidence and dexterity approaching sleight of hand. Hold a bit of stick, as thick as your thumb, and about a foot long, and wave it rapidly across the fox's mask, within reach of his jaws. The reaction is reflex and certain. He bites the stick in a vice-like grip. That is the exact split second when it is safe to shoot out the other hand to grab him by the scruff of the neck. It takes more cool nerve that I possess, but it was one of Bert Gripton's star performances."

Science teacher Robert Crosland, who teaches at Preston Junior High School some 300 miles east of Boise, is now under police investigation. The incident occurred 45 minutes after school was dismissed. Some local parents told the station that the puppy was deformed and going to die soon anyway, with one adding that Crosland's actions were “very much circle of life.” Crosland and the three students who were present claim the puppy was drowned just before it was fed to the turtle, and was not alive as some early accounts reported.

A family's French bulldog suffocated to death in the overhead compartment on a United Airlines flight after a flight attendant forced the dog's owner to place the dog there for the entire three-hour-long flight from Houston to New York. The dog was in a standard soft sided pet carrier, and the family had paid an airline fee to carry the dog with them in the cabin.

Ms. Catalina Castano was traveling with her 11-year-old daughter and 2-month-old son along with her 10-month-old French bulldog. Ms Castano repeatedly asked the flight attendant to let her keep the dog by her feet, but the flight attendant insisted she stow the dog in the overhead bin. United Airlines has apologized and accepted full responsibility, whatever that means.

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

I once got stoked up on way too much coffee and explained to someone, with a sharpie and four place mats from the coffee shop, that everyone in rock was only three degrees or less separated from John Mayall. Now I realize I could have just shown him this picture. From left to right: Eric Burdon (The Animals), John Mayall (Bluesbreakers), Jimi Hendrix, Steve Winwood (Traffic), and Carl Wayne (The Move).﻿

The good news is that there actually are competent dog trainers in the world. Not all of them use e-collars, but no competent dog trainer demonizes any tool that is provably working for millions, whether that is a flat collar, a slip collar, a prong collar, food treats, a clicker, an e-collar, a head harness, or a flexi-lead.

In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of whole leaf Stevia extract against B. burgdorferi spirochetes, persisters, and biofilm forms in vitro. The susceptibility of the different forms was evaluated by various quantitative techniques in addition to different microscopy methods. The effectiveness of Stevia was compared to doxycycline, cefoperazone, daptomycin, and their combinations. Our results demonstrated that Stevia had significant effect in eliminating B. burgdorferi spirochetes and persisters. Subculture experiments with Stevia and antibiotics treated cells were established for 7 and 14 days yielding, no and 10% viable cells, respectively compared to the above-mentioned antibiotics and antibiotic combination. When Stevia and the three antibiotics were tested against attached biofilms, Stevia significantly reduced B. burgdorferi forms. Results from this study suggest that a natural product such as Stevia leaf extract could be considered as an effective agent against B. burgdorfer.

But wait. Before you start dumping Stevia packets you have lifted from Starbucks into your dog's food, be aware that Stevia does NOT cure Lyme.

For one thing, those Starbucks Stevia packets are a highly refined product, and what you will be wanting is whole leaf Stevia, preferably stalks from plants you have grown in your own garden and not stuff imported from China.

Even then it will not work.

Read the indented paragraph above very carefully. Do you see the words IN VITRO? That means this stuff only works in a test tube or petri dish.

Why won't it work in your dog (or you)?

Simple: to treat Lyme disease, the chemical compounds in Stevia must be absorbed through the intestines, but Stevia is mostly NOT absorbed in the intestines, which is why it works so well as a sweetener.

In short, the Stevia story is interesting and may yield a new product in time, but for now the best way to treat a dog with Lyme is with antibiotics.

For more information on that, see here and here and here and here. These links advise using doxycline to treat Lyme, but the same results can be achieved with amoxicillin at 10 mg per pound of dog, dosed twice a day.

That post summarizes a 20-year study done by the FDA for the U.S. military:

"It turns out that the expiration date on a drug does stand for something, but probably not what you think it does. Since a law was passed in 1979, drug manufacturers are required to stamp an expiration date on their products. This is the date at which the manufacturer can still guarantee the full potency and safety of the drug.

"Most of what is known about drug expiration dates comes from a study conducted by the Food and Drug Administration at the request of the military. With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date.... So the expiration date doesn't really indicate a point at which the medication is no longer effective or has become unsafe to use.... Is the expiration date a marketing ploy by drug manufacturers, to keep you restocking your medicine cabinet and their pockets regularly? You can look at it that way."

The Wall Street Journalput this story on their front page a few years back.

"Do drugs really stop working after the date stamped on the bottle? Fifteen years ago, the U.S. military decided to find out. Sitting on a $1 billion stockpile of drugs and facing the daunting process of destroying and replacing its supply every two to three years, the military began a testing program to see if it could extend the life of its inventory. The testing, conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ultimately covered more than 100 drugs, prescription and over-the-counter. The results, never before reported, show that about 90% of them were safe and effective far past their original expiration date, at least one for 15 years past it.

"In light of these results, a former director of the testing program, Francis Flaherty, says he has concluded that expiration dates put on by manufacturers typically have no bearing on whether a drug is usable for longer. Mr. Flaherty notes that a drug maker is required to prove only that a drug is still good on whatever expiration date the company chooses to set. The expiration date doesn't mean, or even suggest, that the drug will stop being effective after that, nor that it will become harmful."

How can your doctor or vet not know this?

Well, to start with, on some important issues, veterinarians are often taught very little. The entire "course" given on canine nutrition, for example, may be a single lecture from a dog food salesman. The lecture on flea and tick remedies may be a lecture from a Merial salesperson who will detail "the spread" to be made from selling non-prescription Frontline as if it were a prescription drug (hint: it's not).

As for antibiotics, vets will learn by heart the branded and generic names of variouus drugs, and what they treat, but they may not learn other essential information.

And, as alarming as it may sound, that's true for many human doctors too.

Fear-based aggression in small dogs is pretty common and this is how you deal with it -- by facing it head on, not letting the dog push you away, and normalizing gentle touch with rewards for calm behavior. This is RJ Hebner at Zenergy Dog Training saving a life. Nice job!

That's where the leopards come in.About 40 percent of the average Indian leopard’s diet consists of feral or stray dogs.

A population of 35 urban leopards in Mumbai, researchers estimate, "may consume about 1,500 dogs per year, saving around 1,000 bite incidents and 90 potential rabies cases.” The presence of leopards was also estimated to save $18,000 in dog management costs.

Of course, leopards are not without their costs.

In 2017, there were seven leopard attacks in the Mumbai area. Even if all of those leopard attacks were fatal, however, urban leopards would still represent a net gain in human life.Of course, the case can be made that the simply catching, drowning, poisoning, and shooting as many feral dogs as possible, while providing free vaccination to as many pet dogs as possible, is the most obvious way forward. Which it is. That said, every leopard attack around Mumbai gets a tremendous amount of fear-driven media coverage. Perhaps it's time for a little more attention to be given to the upside of urban big cats?

After all the data suggests that, taken as a whole, they are doing more good than harm.

In 1930s Australia, it was decided that there were too many Emus out in the western bush, and so Australia's military armed itself with Lewis machine guns, and went out to war with the birds .... and promptly lost.

The Great Emu War of 1932, was waged to address public concern that there were a large number of emus "running amok" in the Campion district of Western Australia. In truth, the Emus (as many as 20,000) had invaded because farmers had made stock tanks and ponds for water and planted an abundance of wheat.

Part of the problem was that the birds were so fast that, no matter how many were gathered in one spot, after the first few shots they’d all scatter faster than any man could run.

At one point, Meredith ordered a Lewis gun to be mounted on the back of a truck to try to keep up with the running birds. It still didn’t work — it turns out that a truck that can do 65 mph on a paved road struggles to make 20 mph over rough land, and you can’t stabilize a machine gun on a static mount or shoot with any accuracy. Worse, a single truck can only chase one emu at a time, and the hundreds of others will invariably run away from the vehicle, making a clean getaway almost every time.

“If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world,” he was quoted as saying. “They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like Zulus whom even dumdum bullets could not stop.”

The paper also quoted another emu-hunter as saying: “There’s only one way to kill an emu — shoot him through the back of the head when his mouth is closed, or through the front of his mouth when his mouth is open. That’s how hard it is.”

Following their battle field defeat to the emus, the Australian government decided to incentivize local farmers to engage in self-help using a bounty system.

Instead of brute-forcing the culling of emus, the government set aside money for bounties and let the farmers themselves do the hard work of tracking and shooting the emu menace. This was much more effective. In 1934 alone, nearly 58,000 bounties were claimed.

Friday, March 09, 2018

Have you noticed that in the world of dogs, names and places never quite line up?

Look at Welsh Terriers.

I know digging men in Wales, but none that use a Kennel Club Welsh Terrier to hunt fox to ground.

I know digging men in Scotland, but none that use a Scottish terrier.

Afghans?

There are no Kennel Club Afghan dogs coursing in South Central Asia.

Show line German Shepherds?Not too many of those herding sheep in Germany!

And in central Africa, the locals are not using "Congo Terriers" that have Kennel Club papers.

A Congo terrier?

What on earth is that?

The Kennel Club's Pariah Dog

The “Congo terrier” was discovered by explorer Georg Schweinfurth on an expedition to Africa in 1869.

He called the dogs "Niam-niam dogs," which described the tribal region where they were found, and he noted they were often quite fat, as the Niam-niam people loved dogs so much they thought nothing of tossing them into the stew pot for dinner!

The dogs themselves were spitz-like and barkless, with erect ears and curled tails, as is often the case with primitive dogs. Where the Niam-niam dogs were different was in their relatively small size, their short coat, and the fact that they often featured a white band of fur around their neck.

Though Schweinfurth called them Niam-niam dogs, similar animals were found across a wide belt of central Africa, stretching from Liberia in the West, to Sudan in the East.

Like many other primitive landrace pariah dogs, the Niam-niam dog had only one estrus a year and rarely barked, but instead vocalized with howls, yodels, and whines similar to those of the wolf, coyote, dingo, or jackal.

Of course, a largely silent dog in thick cover is not necessarily an asset. No matter; this deficit was corrected by African hunters who attached a wooden "bell" or clapper to the necks of their dogs so they could more easily drive small game out of thick cover.

In 1895, the Niam-niam dog was displayed at the Crufts dog show as the "Congo terrier."

The name did not last too long.

In the late 1930s, the Congo Terrier was formally brought into the Kennel Club and renamed the "Basenji" -- a Bantu name that meant "village dog."

Inbreeding to Failure

Seven dogs, of course, is not much of a gene pool. In fact, the gene pool of the Basenji never grew much bigger than this. Over the course of the next 60 years, no more than 30 dogs comprised the entire founding stock of the breed in the U.K., the U.S., and Europe.

Inbreeding within this small stock of foundation dogs quickly led to a crushing genetic load and a rise in disease.

The first issue to raise its head was Hemolytic Anemia. When testing was started, twenty percent of all Basenjis carried this recessive gene. What to do?

The answer: Cull.

And cull they did, with about 18 percent of Basenjis weeded out of the American Kennel Club gene pool over the course of a decade.

Of course, this deep reduction in an already narrow gene pool sped up the inbreeding merry-go-round.

The Outcross Solution

The good news was that there were was no shortage of excellent dogs in Africa. After a 1988 visit to the Congo, AKC judge Damara Bolte reported that:

"In five days and 800 kilometers of driving, we saw at least 200 dogs of which only three were not Basenjis."

Could anyone driving down the road see the same number of Welsh Terriers in Wales, or Scottish Terriers in Scotland? Impossible!

In 1990 the Basenji Club of America successfully petitioned the American Kennel Club to open the AKC registry to African dogs, and 12 were admitted.

The addition of 12 African imports helped, but it was not enough. With popular sire selection, inbreeding within the Basenji gene pool continued. And how could it not, with less than a dozen dogs comprising over 95% of the Y chromosomes in Kennel Club dogs across the U.S., Europe and the U.K.?

Form, Function and Fantasy

As noted earlier, Basenjis have always been found across a wide swath of central Africa. The early dogs came from the Sudan, Sierra Leon, Liberia, the Cameroon, and the Congo.

In 1998, an American Peace Corpsworker in Benin reported the country was awash in Basenjis, and that they could be acquired for as little as a dollar.

In 2004, an American imported six of these dogs, and they were shown at the 2004 Basenji Club of America Nationals. By then, however, the AKC registry had once again closed.

The Basenji Club petitioned the AKC to reopen the registry. This was done in January 2007, with a new closing scheduled for 2013.

Will opening the AKC Basenji registry a second time really matter?

Yes and no.

It will not matter to the Basenjis in Africa, which have never needed saving.

The hunting dogs of Africa are protected by those who hunt them. In this regard, they are no different from the working terriers of Wales and Scotland, the coursing dogs of South Central Asia, or bird dogs the world over.

But the Basenji community will not be dissuaded. They insist they are "saving" a breed.

But what is it that they saving, and who are they saving it from?

One thing is clear: Basenji enthusiasts are not trying to save hunting dogs in Africa.

You cannot save dogs in Africa by removing them from the continent, and you cannot save a hunting breed by not hunting them at all.

So what are the Kennel Club enthusiasts really trying to save?

Mostly, they are working to preserve a romantic notion of their own making.

For their breed to be special, a Basenji has to be more than another village dog, even if the word "Basenji" means just that in the Lingala language of the Congo.

And so, Basenji owners tighten down on what they see as the “special essentials” of their breed.

They insist no Basenji should ever bark, and never mind if some always have, and that a barkless dog is such a liability that the Africans themselves bell their dogs when they hunt.

And, of course, all Basenjis must have a tightly curled tail, and no matter that a tightly curled tail serves no function in the field.

Function? The American and European Basenji is not about function! This dog is about form and fantasy.

Hunting? What does hunting have to do with the Basenji? Nothing!

Why should Basenjis be held to a working standard when the Kennel Club Welsh Terrier and Scotty are not? This is the Kennel Club, not the African bush. Form trumps function; everyone knows that. And form is maintained by inbreeding right up to the edge of genetic failure. Why should the Basenji be any different in this regard?

And so Kennel Club Basenji enthusiasts hold tightly to a breed standard invented in England based on seven dogs. And when shown pictures of small hunting dogs in central Africa that do not quite conform to every aspect of "the standard,” they sniff disdainfully.

“Those aren’t Basenjis. Those are nothing more than village hunting dogs."

Right. No irony there!

Just ask any Welshman with mud on his boots, calluses on his hands, and a terrier at his heels. What does he know of Welsh terriers? Not a thing!

And so we come to the ultimate irony: What are Basenji enthusiasts trying to protect their American and European dog from?

Why inbreeding within the closed registry system of the Kennel Club, of course!.

What a wonderful thing it would be if the dog show announcers told the whole truth!

When the Great Danes are paraded around the ring, the voice over would tell the audience that the Kennel Club's own breed health survey says these dogs are dead, on average, by age 7, with over 30 percent dying of inheritable heart issues, 15 percent from bloat (gastric torsion), and 5 percent being put down for temperament.

And what about costs? Embrace Pet Insurance puts the cost for diagnosis and treatment for bloat at $1,500-$7,500, the cost for diagnosing and treating heart issues at $500-$1,500, and the cost of treating hip dysplasia at $1,500-$6,000. As Embrace Pet Insurance notes:

Pet insurance for Great Danes costs more than for mixed breed dogs. This is because Great Danes are much more likely than mixed breed dogs to make claims for hereditary conditions that are expensive to treat.

About one in four Harlequin Great Danes are born deaf, and most of these dogs are put to sleep -- something a professional breeder might "take care of" on their own (and on the cheap) by simply slipping a puppy into the freezer or "bucketing" in a tank of water.

Buy a Harlequin Great Dane and you become complicit in the routine and predictable euthanasia of puppies born with preventable problems.

Well, no; he’s not. TR, the first president to designate national monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act, used that authority widely and wisely. Zinke is doing his best to prevent new national monuments and vandalize existing ones. For example, he held listening sessions on a draft bill that would impede future designations by requiring approval from state governors, counties and property owners. And he has made recommendations that would shrink Bears Ears National Monument in Utah and degrade current management. As a congressman Zinke stridently opposed and voted against designation of national monuments....

...Hunters and anglers are too easily seduced by candidates who bloviate about the Second Amendment or flounce around at photo ops with borrowed fly rods and shotguns. Sportsmen need to pay more attention to what those candidates do and less attention to what they say. And when politicians and appointed officials work against fish and wildlife, sportsmen need to get loudly on their cases, then vote the right way.

Was James Watt really worse than Ryan Zinke, as Bowhunting.com claims? We’ll have to wait and see. But if Zinke stays his current course, it can be argued that Watt was better in that he was sufficiently stupid to get fired for bragging that he’d hired “a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple.”

On March 1, 2018, Adam Bartsch was out on a walk looking for shed antlers and setting trail cameras along the Campbell River in British Columbia, Canada, when he looked up to see he was being watched by a very large male Mountain Lion who was no more than 20 meters away. Bartsch attempted to scare the cougar away 3 times and, after the third attempt, the big cat left and Bartsch was able to walk out out of the area without incident. "No Mountain Lions were harmed in the making of this movie."

Charles Cruft, pictured below, was born in 1852 into a family of jewelers. Charles had no interest in his family's business, and upon graduation from college in 1876, took a job with AmericanJames Spratt, who had set up a new venture in Holborn, London selling "dog cakes".

Charles Cruft did not own a dog, but he was an ambitious dog food salesman, and traveled around England and Scotland drumming up business for Spratt. Cruft's travels brought him in contact with large estates, sporting kennels and the first commercial dog breeders in the U.K.

While traveling to Europe in 1878 hawking Spratt's dog biscuits, a group of French dog breeders invited the young Cruft (just two years out of college!) to organize and promote the canine section of the Paris Exhibition, which he did.

Upon returning to England in 1886, Crufts took up the management of the Allied Terrier Club Show at the Royal Aquarium at Westminster, with an eye towards making money.

The first formal "Cruft's Show" was booked into the Royal Agricultural Hall, Islington in 1891. This was the first in a long series of dog shows that Crufts held there, each of them making an appealing profit for Cruft who still did not own a dog himself.

In 1938 Charles Cruft died, still having never owned a dog, and his widow ran the 1939 Crufts Dog Show. Three years later Mrs Cruft felt the responsibility for running the show too demanding and, in order to perpetuate the name of the show her husband had made world famous, she asked the Kennel Club to take it over and it was sold to them.

The 1948 Crufts Dog Show was the first under the Kennel Club auspices.

Coffee is Good for You
Discover magazine says the data is in: coffee is good for you. "Two umbrella reviews were published last year (here and here), and their findings flew in the face of centuries of coffee gossip. The verdict was that coffee drinking is linked to lowered risk of myriad diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, a few types of cancer, liver disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and depression—not too shabby. Above all, coffee drinkers were less likely to die early from any cause."

When Adding a Predator Helps

American Grey Squirrels have been displacing native Red Squirrels in the UK, but research shows that adding Pine Martens, a traditional predator of Red Squirrels helps improve their odds. The reason: Where Pine Marten activity is high, Grey Squirrel populations are far more heavily suppressed than Red Squirrel populations, giving a competitive advantage to Red Squirrels.

More Than 40 Acres and a Mule
The Brazilian government has designated 220,000 hectares of Amazonian rainforest for the Cachoeira Porteira quilombo community of 500 people in Pará state who are the descendants of some of the the 4.5 million slaves who were brought to Brazil between 1600 and 1850 and who escaped. Portugal was responsible for shipping 4.9 million people from Western Africa to Brazil, by far the largest amount of human cargo transported during the Atlantic slave trade.

The Greater Siren
One of the largest amphibians in the world -- up to three feet -- is slinking around much of the swamps of the southeastern USA and I had never even heard of it.

One Year Ago Maryland Did What Was Needed
One year ago Maryland's ban on 45 kinds of assault weapons and a 10-round limit on gun magazines was upheld by a federal appeals court. "Put simply, we have no power to extend Second Amendment protections to weapons of war," Judge Robert King wrote for the court, adding that the Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller explicitly excluded such coverage.

NRA Gun Nuts are Dangerous
Researchers found a stunning 20% drop in gun injuries nationwide during NRA conventions. The NRA, often asserts that education is key to keeping injury rates down — and that guns are totally safe when handled by people who know how to use them. If that were true, the gun injury rate should have held stable or even risen during NRA conventions when thousands of experienced and heavy gun users were at an NRA convention Instead, they found the opposite.

U.S. Army bomb dogs that saved American lives under fire, were treated like crap when they came home and often willfully put them in harm's way.

In a report by the Inspector General of the US Armyreleased last week, it was revealed that many bomb-sniffing military dogs who served overseas were were mistreated through a "lack of care and attention" when the came home, making it necessary to put many of the animals down. Dogs that were adopted may have gone to homes of unscreened individuals. Some dogs with histories of biting were given to families with children, and others were given to owners who lacked the ability or resources to care for them. In some cases, soldiers who wanted to adopt the dogs that they'd worked with overseas were told that they had no right to do so.

Wednesday, March 07, 2018

March: The cubs are born after a 53-day pregnancy. Their coats are dark gray -- almost black. The vixen generally stays to ground except to defecate. Food for the vixen is brought by the dog fox, who is sometimes aided by adolescent females from last year's litter.

April: The cubs will start to toddle out of the earth, but they will not go very far afield. The dark coats of the pups are now beginning to turn a faint reddish-brown. The adult fox will begin to bring mice, voles, and moles to the den for the cubs to play with.

May:The cubs are beginning to look like adults, and they are beginning to show some independence. This is a period of rapid learning through aggressive play. The pups spend a lot of time toying with mice and other small carcasses brought to them by adults.

June:The temperature is now too hot for the fox to stay underground. Pups and adult fox abandon flea-infested breeding earths and rest above ground in thickets. The pups do not stray far from their parents, but begin to catch bugs and mice on their own. The corn fields are planted and grow rapidly. Young rabbits and groundhogs, as well as ground-nesting birds, represent a bonanza food-source

July:Young adolescent cubs lie above ground and hunt with their parents. The young fox are gaining weight rapidly. Insect, bird and rodent populations rise. The young fox begin to hunt on their own. As the corn reaches four feet, adult and adolescent fox move into the center of the fields where they can rest in the cool shade during the day. Berries, mice, rats, frogs, snakes, young rabbits, baby groundhogs, and corn provide ready food.

August: The cubs are now catching food on their own, and they are sleeping apart from the adults. Adolescent fox remain in their parent's territories. Fox are rarely seen during the day, and generally leave the shade of the corn fields only in the evening. Mice and rat populations are the main food source, along with grasshoppers, fruit, corn, and scavenged roadkill.

September: Adults and sub-adults look very similar. Sub-adults may spar, and siblings may be spotted near each other, but they are now totally independent from their parents. The first corn fields are cut, but fox remain above ground as it is too hot.

October: Male foxes strike out on their own.Young males may travel considerable distances to secure their own territories. The corn has now been cut off the fields, and the fox are jungling up in the thickets again. It is still warm, and very few fox are denning. Evenings are cool, however, and winter coats start to come in. Food is plentiful as end-of-season berries and crops mature.

November:Young adults take over the territories of dead or weak parents. Several young females may reside in a dominant male's territory, but typically only one female will mate. The last corn is off the fields, and the last hay is cut.

December: Foxes defend their territories as the mating season approaches. Hormones rise, and females excavate and clean out old groundhog dens. New excavations in fields and hedgerows are a likely sign of fox, as most groundhogs are already prepared for winter. Fox dens will begin to smell slightly skunky. Pairs of fox will often be bolted out of the earth at this time. Many farms plow under their corn stalks.

January: The mating season is in full-swing, with male and female fox on the prowl. Dens will have a slightly "skunky" smell due to hormones in the urine of the vixen. Fox will pair up and remain paired for the next five months. This is one of the best months for terrier work, especially during inclement weather.

February: Dog foxes and vixens begin to settle down. The vixens will chose a breeding earth in which to whelp. February is a prime month for terrier work, as the dens are settled but the pups are not yet in residence. Fox are most likely to be home after a night of ice, snow or freezing rain, or when the wind is blowing.